The invention is in the field of computer assisted transcription apparatus or word processing systems.
In certain professional fields the need arises for transcription of technical documents containing a highly specialized vocabulary. One field in which such transcriptions are routinely relied upon is in the medical field. Doctors will often dictate notes following patient examinations, which notes must then be transcribed into the patient records. The transcription process is usually performed by trained medical transcriptionists who are familiar with the specialized vocabulary of the particular field of medicine.
Reliance on such specially trained transcriptionists involves extensive training, resulting in long lead-times to high productivity. In addition, mistranscriptions in the often complex, specialized terminology of some fields of medicine may significantly impact the quality of medical care received by a patient. Thus, it is important for the transcriptionist to have access to a medical dictionary to verify spellings. Unfortunately, the use of a dictionary to either manually or electronically retrieve technical words is time consuming, inefficient, and cost-ineffective.
There exists a system with automatic expansion of words as they are entered into the system by a user. The system is known as XyWrite, available from XyQuest, Inc., and includes the feature of having automatic expansion of words. Similar to a macro program in a computer word processing system, the automatic expansion feature of XyWrite enables a user to assign full words to abbreviations for those words. Thus, a user may assign the abbreviation "com" to the word "communication" in a user-defined vocabulary. Any time a user wants to incorporate the word "communication" into the typed text, the abbreviation may be typed instead of the full word. However, this system requires that the user predefine each abbreviation, which may entail hours of set-up time.
Another system for entering full text words by typing abbreviations is called "PRD+", available from Productivity Software International, Inc., New York, N.Y. This product includes a medical transcription edition for using abbreviations for medical terminology used in transcribing medical records, as described above. In that system, there is a one-to-one correlation between a typed abbreviation and a word. As the user types, the system identifies the word corresponding to the abbreviation, or fraction of a word. When the user hits a preselected key, such as the space bar, the complete word is entered in place of the abbreviation. For example, as a user types the word "posterior", the full word will be entered once the user types "pos", followed by a space bar. Alternatively, the user may assign words or phrases to acronyms or abbreviations. For example, the phrase "was admitted to the hospital" may be entered once the user types the abbreviation "wah".
Often it is desirable for a user to be able to select the word to be entered during word processing. In the above example, the abbreviation "pos" may be used to refer to the full word "posterior", or may also be used to refer to the words "positive", "positioning", "postcardiometry", "postmortem", or a variety of terms or phrases. In the prior art systems, the user cannot select which word is to be inserted into the text after a given abbreviation or portion of a word is typed into the text. Other prior art systems may use contextual relationships of words as one criteria for selection of words. These systems do not provide consistent abbreviations, thus slowing down the transcription time.
There remains a need for an improved word processing and transcription system for generating a display list of words and phrases following an initial entry of some or all letters of text by a user for enabling the user to selectively enter a word or phrase from the list into a word processor.